The add to cart button: what top stores do (and how to raise your add to cart rate)

Your add to cart rate is the share of visits where someone puts at least 1 product in the cart. The formula is simple: sessions with an add to cart ÷ total sessions × 100. 1,000 visits and 70 of them added something? Your add to cart rate is 7%.

On Shopify you don't need to work it out. Open the Conversion rate breakdown report in your analytics. Shopify's help center describes it as a funnel: all sessions, then "sessions with cart additions," then sessions that reached checkout, then sessions that completed checkout. The second step, as a share of all sessions, is your add to cart rate.

Why not just watch conversion rate? Because this number shows where shoppers stop.

Littledata's Shopify benchmarks rank stores from worst to best, which tells you much more than one average. The median store gets 6.8% of sessions to add to cart. The top 20% get 12% or more, the top 10% get 17% or more, and the bottom 20% sit at 3.4% or less.

Treat these as a rough guide. A store selling cheap refills will see a higher rate than one selling sofas, so your best comparison is your own store last month. For the full picture, see our ecommerce conversion rate benchmarks.

Before you touch the button, check where people actually drop. Put your add to cart rate next to the other steps in the Shopify funnel and read it like this:

When the add to cart rate is low, store owners blame the button first. Most of the time the button is fine. It's the questions nobody answered above it.

A good add to cart button doesn't need to be clever. It needs to be impossible to miss. Here's what we look for when we review a product page at FunnelSpark, an ecommerce CRO agency for Shopify stores:

What about Shopify's "Buy it now" button? Shopify's help center explains that these accelerated checkout buttons show with the Add to cart button and send shoppers straight to checkout, skipping the cart. Branded versions show logos like Shop Pay or PayPal instead. Quicker for some shoppers, but they skip your cart offers. You can show or hide them, so test it.

One small idea worth stealing: put the price on the button itself. It saves space and removes one more "how much was it?" glance.

We broke down 25 top online stores page by page, including Gymshark, Crocs, Chewy, SKIMS and Fenty Beauty. The button itself looked ordinary on almost all of them. The work happened in the few inches around it, where each store answers the last worries before the click:

Reviews answer "is it good?" Swatches and size guides answer "will it suit me?" Shipping, returns and pay later answer "what if it goes wrong?"

Blueland does this in about 3 lines. Cambridge Satchel keeps its delivery details open by default, so shoppers don't even have to tap. KEEN shows "Low stock" when it's true, plus delivery and returns details. Our product page optimization guide covers the rest of the page above the button.

If you add trust badges near the button, keep them few and real. Only 8 of the 25 stores show trust-type badges or logos at all. Here's what we found on trust badges.

A sticky add to cart is a small bar that stays on screen as shoppers scroll, so the button is always one tap away. Only 3 of the 25 top stores we broke down use one: Bodybuilding.com, Quad Lock and Cambridge Satchel. All 3 have long product pages, with plenty of details and reviews below the button.

Does it work? It depends on the page. On a long product page, shoppers often scroll away from the button just as they make up their mind, and a sticky bar keeps it within reach. On a short page, it mostly adds clutter. That makes it a good idea to test, not a sure thing.

Our rule of thumb: if your page runs longer than about 2 phone screens, test a sticky bar on mobile with the name, price and button. If a size must be picked first, have the button scroll shoppers back to the options.

Shoppers need to see that the click worked. A cart drawer that slides open beats a tiny number changing on a cart icon. Sanrio opens a cart drawer instantly.

That moment is also when shoppers are most open to one more item. 22 of the 25 top stores we broke down cross-sell or upsell before checkout, and 19 do it in the cart itself. Quad Lock shows an order bump the moment you add to cart. Keep it to 1 or 2 add-ons that fit what's already in the cart. Our guide to upsells vs cross-sells shows how top stores do it.

Then carry the same promises into the cart: shipping, returns, ways to pay. Adding your own text inside Shopify's checkout steps needs Shopify Plus, so the cart is the last easy place to repeat them.

Here's the order we'd work through on most stores, from the cheapest fix to the bigger builds:

How do you judge these tests? Add to cart rate is a fast signal, which helps when traffic is low: proving a 10% lift in orders at a 2% conversion rate takes about 161,000 visitors. But fuller carts don't always mean more money, so confirm winners on orders and revenue per visitor. Our guide to ecommerce A/B testing explains how to set up the test.

Not sure which of these your store needs? Our free Leak Finder walks you through 20 checks from homepage to checkout, and our 15 fixes to increase your Shopify conversion rate covers the rest of the funnel.